Some listening activities will wake your pupils up, make them move about, create movement and/or noise. Others will calm down, make them concentrate on what is in front of them and create a peaceful atmosphere. Sometimes we want to have a nice quiet atmosphere and sometimes we want our children move about and we can use listening activities for both purposes (Scott and Lisbeth – Teaching English to Children, Pearson, 2004)

Here is an example of listening activity that make your students move about.

This is an exciting form of story telling which you can do from a very early stage is to create stories with children. First the setting: “When did the story happen?” ‘ Once upon a time…’ We must accept the first answer that comes, no censoring allowed. ‘Okay, Once upon a time in…? ‘Egg’

‘Fine . Once upon a time in a country , town called Egg. There was…?’ And so on.

This gives a real feeling of shared story and you cannot tell how the story will end- but it does, usually rather unconventionally. Making up stories with children at all stages helps them to put their thoughts into words and gives them a starting point for their own writing.

When your pupils are ready to cooperate with others, we recommend some sort of regular grouping as follow:

Pairwork

Pairwork is a very useful and efficient way of working in language teaching. It is simple to organise .

Let pupils who are sitting near each other work together. Don’t move the desks , chairs should only be moved it absolutetly necessary

Estabilsh a routine for pairwork, so that when you say : ‘Now work in your pairs’, pupils know what is expected of them.

Pairwork means that everyone in the class is occupied, but even if everyone in the class is working on the same thing, not all pairs will finish at the same time. Do not be tempted to let the pairwork continue until everyone has finished. As soon as you see that several of the pairs have finished. Ask the others to finish off.

If you do not have an even number of pupils in the class, then let one group as a three.

Go through what you want pupils to do before you put them into their pairs ( Scott and Ythreberg, 2004, Teaching English to Children, Pearson)